by Tim Gilmore, 8/30/2015
See also Gary’s Ice Cream / Creamette.
Because history forms at the cross-section of time and human endeavor, and eating ice cream ranks among the better human activities, and the people who serve up strawberry soft-serve in a waffle cone grant a moment of forgetting
suffering, or of family joy, and neurological tracks of electric pleasure in the two-and-a-half-pound human brain:
the Dreamette.
Because Johnny Nettles built the 672 square-foot building, not including the canopy, for an ice cream shop he called the Creamette in 1948, and between the tall sign at the sliver of Post and Cypress Streets and the walk-up window, the Dreamette’s its own peninsula a half-block off Edgewood.
Because a banana split comes with chocolate syrup, strawberries, pineapple, walnuts, cherries, and, uh, bananas. Because of Blue Hawaiian milkshakes. Because of piña colada slushes.
opening night at the original Creamette, now the Dreamette, Murray Hill, 1948
Because on opening night of the Creamette Ice Cream Drive-In, between 1500 and 1800 people stood in long lines that streamed down Post Street and wrapped along Edgewood Avenue. According to a newspaper account, “More than 1200 cones of Creamette were dished out along with other things.” Because I wonder what these mysterious “other things” might have been, but doubt very seriously they were Mason jars of moonshine. Readers were told to “drop in anytime between noon and midnight, any day, and find out what you’re missing.”
